5 Tips To Improve Your YouTube Marketing Strategy

When it comes to marketing yourself on YouTube, there is really only one golden rule you need to know—and yet, it’s the most difficult one for everyone to execute.

Volume. Wins. Ask any full-time YouTuber, social celebrity, successful vlogger, or brand on YouTube and they will tell you that their viewership rose as soon as they started increasing their volume. Now, there is a tipping point, and you can’t simply be publishing rubbish content and expect it to perform well. The perfect intersection is quality content but published on an extremely regular basis—but it’s the regularity that often gets glossed over.

The reason so many people struggle with this is because, well, consistency is hard work. But every successful content creator out there knows the value: when you publish content on a regular basis, you create a cadence with your audience.

They know when to look for your content, and start to make a habit of checking your channel on a weekly, daily, or sometimes even hourly basis. And it’s this cadence that you ultimately want. The more times they come back, the better.

That said, volume is the short answer. Here are five things you can do to drastically improve your YouTube marketing strategy.

1. Do Your Research

One of the most undervalued aspects of content marketing is getting a firm grasp of the landscape. Before you start publishing your own content, you should take some time to look around at who else is playing in your niche or market, and what they are doing to succeed.

Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of your competition, and you’ve gotten a sense of what sort of content they’re putting out, it’s time for #2.

2. Make A List Of Content Buckets

One of the best ways to create efficiencies within your hours spent marketing is to divide and conquer. YouTube marketing really comes down to picking a few key areas where you feel you can deliver true thought leadership, entertainment, or some kind of value, and then mass producing content that falls within those larger buckets.

For example: Say you are a soap company, and you want to use YouTube to sell more soap. Maybe one “bucket” would be Education—you want to educate people on why soap is important. Another “bucket” would be reviews—you want to review the best soaps on the market, and then direct people to where they can buy them.

As soon as you start thinking this way, you’ll find it much, much easier to come up with not only quality content but content that always falls in line with your larger strategy.

Once you have your list of content buckets, and you know what it is you’ll be creating, it’s time to answer this tough, tough question: “What do I have the time and resources to make, well?”

3. Create A Content Cadence

If you aren’t consistent, you’ll never build a loyal audience. Period.

As mentioned above, consistency is the hardest part—especially when it comes to posting quality video content, since video is an investment. When it comes to YouTube, especially if you want to treat it as a marketing channel, it has to be all or nothing.

You either get really into posting video content, and you execute it well, or you don’t at all. There are very few successful case studies of people who sat right in the gray area.

The best advice for creating a content cadence is to set the tone from the beginning and let your audience know what to expect. Make your introduction video an introduction to what sort of content you will be publishing, and how often—and then whatever cadence you set for yourself, make sure you follow through. Don’t promise to post videos every day and then end up posting once per month.

As soon as you make that promise, the game is on. And if you don’t, your audience will leave. It’s that simple.

4. Add Subtitles To Your Videos

One of the newest (and best!) tools that behemoths Facebook and YouTube have integrated into their video uploading capabilities is the ability to add subtitles.

Now, it might not seem like that big of a deal, but here’s why it’s crucial to pay attention to: most people watch videos on their phone, in public, without the sound on. If you can’t hear what is being said in the video, you’re going to skip it, right?

That’s why subtitles are so important. When it comes to YouTube marketing, you want as many people as possible to watch your content—and removing one of the biggest barriers of entry (sound) by providing a secondary option is a big win.

5. Collaborate

And finally, one of the most effective ways to get your content disseminated, shared, and ultimately seen is by collaborating with other people who have audiences as well.

The biggest YouTubers and successful brands are well known for collaborating. It is a win-win for everyone involved. When you collaborate with someone else who has a similar audience as you, they get exposure to your audience and you get exposure to theirs.

This is also an extremely viable alternative to buying viewership through ads, for example. Collaborations are far more organic, and if you do it right, you can collaborate with bigger and more well-known channels in order to increase your own credibility.

Many people are very open to collaborating. All you have to do is reach out with an idea, let them know what you would potentially need from them, and then go out and create it together.